Until the huge
camp at Birkenau was completed victims were unloaded at this ramp, now about
a half-mile from the Birkenau main entrance, The Death Gate. It lay in a state
of relative disrepair until the Muzeum recently restored it. The great Polish
writer/survivor Tadeusz Borowski* wrote of his experience working on the ramp
unloading a transport:

"The bolts
crack, the doors fall open. A wave of fresh air rushes inside the train. People...
inhumanly crammed, buried under incredible heaps of luggage, suitcases, trunks,
packages, crates, bundles of every description (everything that had been their
past, and was to start their future). Monstrously squeezed together, they have
fainted from heat, suffocated, crushed one another. Now they push towards the
open doors, breathing like fish cast out on the open sand... A huge, multicolored
wave of people loaded down with luggage pours from the train like a blind, mad
river trying to find a new bed..."